Tuesday, March 12, 2013

It all started with one man's, namely Frederic Vester, attempt to unravel the mystery behind the learning brain with his innocent "learning methods" theory. It took flight and is used and believed by the world over.

Haptic, auditive, visual, and intellectual.

We can all relate with the aforementioned learning styles, but, aside from intellectually, how are any of them intrinsically a "learning" style? Please analyze the shit out of this before you continue.

Some of us need to see to believe, some of us just wanna listen to the love, and some of us always gotta get our hands dirty. But seeing, hearing, and feeling are just 3 of the 5 senses at our disposal. Remember there are also smelling and tasting. Are there complex dogmas surrounding techniques that stimulate learning through tasting your material or smelling for it's meaning? Aside from the occasional eccentric teacher who thinks smelling Italian cooking helps us learn about Italian culture I would say no. To affiliate our senses with learning is tempting but I believe it is a gross oversimplification of the learning process that has led many people, like Frederic Vester, to develop theories that actually confuse us as to what is actually happening when we learn.

Let's first try to understand exactly WHY 5 senses.

We have 5 senses; they have been developed over a long time, each with a unique role, but all working for the one purpose of translating the outside world into a language our brain can use. There you go. Our senses are vehicles for information translation. Period. The brain needs the information translated for many reasons: one of which is to learn - to better adapt us to our impending environment, In other words, help us solve problems on our own. But this is just one of the many needs for easily understood information. Imagine how painful it would be if you had to think for a couple a minutes before you figured to put your hands out to cushion your fall. Although you would never say this is learning, you would say a 5-year-old Korean child effectively reproducing vocally the English word "dog" to his teacher who has drilled it into his little mind through a fun little jig is learning. Essentially the same process is happening with the two. The only difference is that protecting yourself occurs much quicker because the particular senses involved with that information has been accessible to our brain for much more time - millions of years much more - so long that the process could be said to be instinctual. But don't let the word deceive you, instincts are just habits, like learning a word, that have been passed down from such a far back ancestor that they are now part of your subconscious while language is relatively new so it still resides in the retrievable conscious.

The point that needs to be understood is that every second of learning occurs IN the brain so all methods to stimulate learning it should be focused there. But what happens is some brains are better adept to use one sense's language over another and therefore that sense is predominately the venue with which most information is gathered and used to learn. People than equate this sense as a form of learning and in turn focus all learning styles around it. Learning is stripped from the brain to that particular sense and with it all methodology, ideology and terminology. It is like trying to get milk by sucking an empty bottle, not the udder.

What this means to me as a teacher is - our efforts to improve that actual state of learning are diverted to developing teaching techniques that only stimulate reproduction.

To show proof of this one need not look further than nearly any classroom in the world. The classic scene is a room columned with the dark backsides an army of student heads with a over zealous teacher contrasting them with the dance of complacency as bits of unrecognizable matter splew from her mouth and bounce with a *PING* off the foreheads of each student. Occasionally and mostly found only in Kindergartens and Preschools, you find a teacher doing the same dance - but you also see the students bouncing right along soaking up everything coming at them like a sponge. But I ask, how is this different? Both students are being pummeled with information and the only gauge of success is how well they reproduce it.

I foresee a culture raised with these kind of reproduction techniques as a mindless robotic drone people who have lost the curiosity to know the "why" behind the every day and cease to discover their own personal solutions to their own personal issues that invariably sprout up around them as they haphazardly, albeit ignorantly, fuck with their environment..........................wait a sec......

Monday, March 11, 2013

Near the end of the chapter "miscellaneous objections" in the book The Origin of Species, Mr Darwin uses a little quip about embryology to combat a naysayer by the name of Mr. Mivart. He says that many characteristics of distinct species are not recognizable until after certain stages in their embryological development. e.g. the wings of bats, the necks of giraffes etc. He states that the development of an embryo sort of serves as a physical record of the (successful) genealogy of each species and that the fine grades of change each embryo undertakes to develop arms or eyes etc. are proof that these species could not have developed these characteristics suddenly and spontaneously. This is all fine and dandy, I will not attempt to justify or negate this, what really stood out to me was how the earlier the stage of the embryo, the more cross-species the characteristics were. All the way until the moment of conception when the embryo is no more then a newly joined sperm and egg and thus physically differs no more from a sparrow to a blue jay to an alligator to a human.

This makes sense to our genetically savvy minds. We all know that genetically speaking, humans differ from a mushroom by only a certain combination of letters. But if you take this idea and put it into terms that speak closer to home like "nothing about being human is unique until after you leave your mother's womb", then maybe more thoughts would be provoked.

Its true (in case you even cared enough to think it wasn't), up until a point (A point not a single human can designate) we are no more unique in any physicality than your most rudimentary land crawler. the only time we gain the title of unique is when we start to stick "I" into the picture of the world by flexing our self-conscious muscle. But we have no idea when we are able to do this. There is no record of this change in or out of the embryo. We just couldn't then what seems by happenstance we knew we liked purple tootsie pops the most.

While with embryology we can trace with cut precision when our legs, mouth, brain etc begin to develop, there is still no way of tracing our consciousness. This is because consciousness still hasn't reached the level of cross-species commonality to be held eligible of the exclusive rank of embryo. Embryos are a secure path for change to make it into the next cut of reality, and it depends on each particular change's utility, paired with time, whether or not it makes the cut. It is needless to point how useful legs are, and even more so under this embryo-bouncer theory, as they are developed during an embryonic stage. Self-consciousness at the level of human is impossible to measure in any embryonic stage and as such it is possible to tell whether humans putting all their eggs into the mind basket during our trip down the path of evolution could be an action that ends dead.

There still hasn't been enough time to tell whether the human's mind; over the hawk's eye, or snake's tongue, or ant's sheer number - is the ticket to the next big show and while our narcissism can't imagine any other reality, the reality is that until our minds, as they stand today, are developed completely while as an embryo, we will never know for sure.

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

As I immerse myself into this world I'm trying to create I see the reflection of things absorbed in the real world. One that keeps coming up is that of correlations.

I guess it comes with the environment.

I reading a book called "The Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin, and this book is amazing for the one fact of correlation. Mr. Darwin developed a theory you may have heard of and spent his entire life collecting data he saw correlated to supporting it. Now this act would not be much celebrated if the theory he proposed was say - popcorn and peanuts belong to the same family of food; but his theory did end up changing the course of history and it could easily be chalked up to his ability to see connections where no one else could. (which is what I propose as the true form of art, but that is a topic left to another time).

I am convinced that the power of correlation is much more important than is assumed.

Here is one I have made.

Mr. Darwin's book is not an easy read. I don't think many people would disagree. I'm certain the majority of people who buy his book do so for reference or for simple pompinuity; it just requires a lot of mental activity to - UNDERSTAND <------- the correlation I made.

Understanding. The section of the brain (at least for me) that encompasses understanding is............

Back in school while I was under the illusion that what I was learning would help me with my economic future, I did learn something that helped me now. My major was Japanese and part of my studies was to indulge my professor's attempts to mostrar us his accomplishments by reading the many books he wrote (in Japanese as he is/was Japanese) on the topic of Japanese politics. Suffice it to say that I was lost for much of the course. His books were not an easy read!!!!
But I learned something - to grasp the contents of a paragraph, you must first have in the back of your mind WHY the paragraph exists; you must understand what the author is trying to express. This is usually summarized in the beginning of the paragraph (in the case of Japanese grammatics - the end).

So when I wanted to understand what the hell my Japanese professor was trying to say in his book, I would first wrap my head around the last sentences of each paragraph and use that information to guide me as I backtracked.

I find myself doing the same thing with Mr. Darwin's book.

There are many times when I have no idea what he is talking about and at those times I just backtrack, find out what he says at the beginning of the paragraph and use it as a guide for understanding the remainder.

The brain is not be frightened by the codex of language - it just needs a framework to work with and it can do the rest.

Friday, January 4, 2013

I have been toying with a theory of mine for quite some time. Wrote about a million different articles each playing with a different version of it or some aspect of it but none of them fully satisfying my ever particular palate enough to be published. Then I had a brain-crack moment and I kid you not almost immediately afterwards I read this (bottom of pg 245 to top of page 246) in the book "The Origin of Species" by my main man Charles Big D. He perfectly illustrates in that paragraph what I had been struggling with for...........some time. I have had similar moments with other authors I enjoy, the biggest one being a couple years ago I developed an idea about how none of us are free in the sense that we seem to interpret it and just a couple months ago I stumble upon a short book called "Free Will" by Sam Harris in which he spells out in words much more precise than I could ever vomit exactly what I had rolling around in my head.

The saying "it's a small world" denotes much more than simply bumping into other people in random places at random times. Even more than bumping into someone who happens to be similar to you in ways you never thought existed. I had, in my own method and through my own mayhem, come up with nearly the same ideologies as people born in different parts of the world, in different circumstances, with different means and purposes, in different languages AND I had come to know of these people's ideas. The grandeur of what actually goes on in each of our lives, how complex and random events happen that cause reactions from us, how these reactions are genetically/habitually disposed to be to some degree unique, how through this entire kaleidoscope of organized mayhem I had come to my own personal opinions and then discovered they were shared by other people to a degree so close you could barely see their differences with a microscope is the most amazing thing about life - it's mayhem that you can enjoy with a fork.